Frailty

Bill Paxton's directing debut stands alone in a horror genre currently infested with pert teens and knowing plot tics. What we have here is addictive old-school hokum, an American Gothic comic-strip with a whiff of Wise Blood to its lurid design. Yet while Frailty's go-it-alone iconoclasm is refreshing, it can also be risky. In its dying minutes, the film swerves itself into a suspect cul-de-sac it can't back out of.

Until then, this works a treat. Matthew McConaughey is the traumatised Texan who recounts his tale to an accompaniment of rumbling thunder, while Paxton co-stars (in flashback) as the God-fearing dad who embarks on a quest to rid the world of "demons". Before you can say hallelujah, religious visions are flaring like fireworks, a magical axe is plucked - Excalibur-like - from a block of wood and the bodies are piling up in the rose garden.

At its best, Paxton's film spotlights a deep south galvanised by Old Testament blood and fury. But it's undone by a whip-lashing climax that's not so much a plot twist as a full-on artistic U-turn. Having safely filed Frailty as a fevered portrait of religious mania, I left feeling I'd been palmed off with something altogether weirder and more worrying: a mad axe-murder movie that the Christian right can enjoy.